This project started out as a small test if it’s even possible to read sensor data into a MVC app like there are ThingsBoard, ThingSpeak and many more. To tune this for your own station, you need to understand a bit about Ruby on Rails and Arduino.
Get the sauce here:
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$ git clone git@bitbucket.org:Tristan_/tbox.git
So yeah, a simple implementation was not hard to make.
I created three models for data storage:
- Station (has_many sensors, has a location)
- Sensor (has a data type and has_many sensors)
- Measurement (value with belongs_to sensor)
The controllers and views are just for showing the data in a pretty way with graphs and tables. So for this to work you only need to add a create method for your station. You can find an example in the scripts/ directory. The first payload sent from the station to the hosting pc is information about all the sensors on the station.
All the additional data sent from then on are snesor readings sent by whatever interval you set.
But as you’d expect I found many shortcomings from this kind of sensor access. I needed to create a connection from the application which wasn’t a seamless experience. The connection was breaking randomly, but it was once a week at most. To set up the connection I needed to time the script and arduino connection just right because it connected over bluetooth and there were some implications. This is fixable by modifiying the arduino code and make it wait until the connection is not fully set up. But i just wanted to make it work. In the future, this project might be revisited.